Golan Flam and I spent more than an hour yesterday in the largest Sam’s wine store in downtown Chicago.

We sort of stumbled upon the Israeli wines (all kosher) in an unlabeled dusty out-of-the-way section. It was depressing…and maddening….and inspiring all at the same time.

The Eastern Mediterranean, of which Israel is a part, is THE BIRTHPLACE OF WINE, after all! Where’s their little corner of the wine menu?

Sam’s has a Greek wines section that randomly includes a lonely wine from Hungary, and one from China, and a dusty bottle from the great Chateau Musar in Lebanon. They’ve gathered up all the wine orphans in the store and inexplicably placed them here.

Maybe we need to give retailers a reason to set up an eastern Med section with country divisions (Israel, Lebanon, etc), perhaps with a Birthplace of Wine theme.

I just don’t see major retailers establishing a separate “Israeli” wine section any time soon (this is not to say I do not want them to) for a couple reasons:

1) there are a limited number of non-kosher Israeli wines in the US (my company basically has them all and they landed in the US only two weeks ago). An Israeli emphasis on leading with the “Kosher” categorization has given the retailers an escape hatch to place the Israeli wines into a kind of Jewish wine ghetto. (Yes, I said ghetto)

2) “Israel” is, sadly, a politically charged concept for too many people

This has been a way more political post than I’m usually all about but some of these things need to be said. Winemaker Golan Flam said to me yesterday after we left Sam’s, “Richard, most people don’t think Israel should exist. Why should we expect them to have an Israeli wine section?”

Here’s the deal…it will take a while for us to get retailers to segment ISRAELI wines into their own space.

But “kosher” is not a country.

I want these great wines to have a seat at the big boys wine table. Israeli wines are like the kid not old enough to sit with the grownups for Thanksgiving, but who is completely out of place with the babies, too.

We need a guerrilla Israeli wine campaign and we need it now.

I’ll work with my designer over the next week or two to design cards you can take with you into your favorite restaurants and retailers, the places you spend your money consistently. The cards will have Israeli Wine Direct’s contact info (did you know we can sell Direct to Trade in a lot of states over the Internet thanks to Inertia Beverage?) and be a way for you to tell the owners of places where you spend your money that we want them to seriously consider wines from Israel, the birthplace of wine, whose wines are The Future of Wine History.

Can you imagine if you are a restaurant and your key customers (forget the wholesalers) bring you cards saying TRY ISRAELI WINES NOW?

The pharmaceutical companies market (very successfully) direct to us………so let’s steal that strategy, flipping it,  and start marketing direct to the suppliers ourselves! Let’s turn the tables on these people. Why in a World Wide Web-ified world should the wine buyer at a restaurant I frequently eat at get to solely decide what wines are on the list without my input?

Game over.

We’re about to go upstream of the 3 T distribution system and connect customers to retailers, and retailers directly to wineries and importers.

I want your feedback. I hope this post gets you fired up. Hate it, love it, let me know either way.

This is our time.

Email me if you are in states like Illinois, California, New York, Florida, Washington and you want to join this guerrilla marketing campaign.